Goethe, out of his abnormal impressionability, for the time being
deliberately assumed the tone of cynical indifference with which he
had become familiar in his intercourse with his friend Behrisch.

[Footnote 43: The exact time and place of its composition is
uncertain, but Goethe's own testimony seems to indicate that it was
mainly written in Leipzig, in 1769. It was first published in 1787,
with some modifications, which affect only the form.]

[Footnote 44: With a fatuity into which he occasionally fell, Goethe
in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ remarks that his two plays are an
illustration of that most Christian text, "Let him who is without sin
among you cast the first stone."]

In direct connection with the shorter poems which Goethe wrote in
Leipzig, there is a passage in his Autobiography which has perhaps
been more frequently quoted than any other, and which, according as we
interpret it, must materially influence our judgment at once on his
character and his genius. The passage is as follows: "And thus began
that tendency of which, all my life through, I was never able to break
myself; the tendency to transmute into a picture or a poem whatever
gave me either pleasure or pain, or otherwise preoccupied me, and thus
to arrive at a judgment regarding it, with the object at once of
rectifying my ideas of things external to me and of calming my own
feelings. This gift was in truth perhaps necessary to no one more than
to me, whose temperament was continually tossing him from one extreme
to another. All my productions proceeding from this tendency that have
become known to the world are only fragments of a great confession
which it is the bold attempt of this book to complete."

From the context of this passage it is to be inferred that the habit
which Goethe describes applied only to the occasional short poems
which he threw off at the different periods of his life. But are we to
infer that the account here given of Goethe's occasional poems applies
to the passionate lyrics which a few years later he was to pour forth
in such abundance? To a very different purport is another passage in
the Autobiography, which is at the same time a striking commentary on
Wordsworth's remark that Goethe's poetry was "not inevitable enough."
"I had come," he there says, "to look upon my indwelling poetic talent
altogether as a force of nature; the more so as I had always been
compelled to regard outward nature as its proper object. The